PC still playing Amiga catchup

[mongo]

You missed some posts.  C64 does not have BOOT option.  You need to type LOAD "*",8,1.  

No. The OS is all in ROM, you only need to load applications.

[mongo]

But it's a requirement before you can run any application (barring Atari 2600 type cartridge boots).  Nobody boots the OS just for the sake of booting the OS.  On Amiga and PC, you can autoboot to any application; therefore, time taken to type LOAD "*",8,1 has to be added to boot-up time.

The criterion is to boot up to what you want to do with the system and that has to involve starting an application.

I want to write programs in COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2.

[mongo]

All this harping on about API's being slow and metal banging being faster:

1) Metal banging is fun but fails the moment the metal changes, even slightly

2) Any loss of processor cycles involved in going down the API route is more than made up for in the fact that systems employing API access to devices tend to be running on CPU's orders of magnitude faster than the 68K.

Cycle for cycle, direct hardware access wins, but when your API is running on a machine that can execute billions of instructions per second, worrying about a function call that might execute a few dozen instructions to get the job done is quite simply nothing short of laughable.

Not to mention that banging the metal with a multitasking OS is generally a bad idea.

[mongo]

Before DirectX 1.0, I had video cards that supported OpenGL, 3D rendering, MPEG4, VGA standard, hardware accerated rendering, etc.

MPEG-4 came out 3 years after DirectX 1.0.

[mongo]

MPEG was there in the Matrox video cards and some ATI cards in early 1990s.  It may not be called MPEG4 but it was for video encoding/decoding.

Nope.

Another big bug with DirectX was that it was API-based and hardly any existing video cards at the time supported it's functions.

How is this a bug, exactly?

Besides, DirectX isn't API based. It is an API.